Human Croquet (23 page)
‘No,’ Madge said, ‘a little boy.’
‘Well, that’s better than nothing, I suppose.’
‘It’s all Eliza’s fault,’ Madge said.
Vinny slammed the car door and Mr Crosland started the engine, lifting one hand in farewell without looking behind as he drove away in a crunching of gravel. Mrs Crosland waved a ringed hand and mouthed goodbye with her big crimson lips. Charles’ pale face rose up behind the glass of the car window, his yelling silenced by the noise of the car engine. The car moved away slowly, down Chestnut Avenue and Charles’ face reappeared in the back window. He seemed to be trying to claw his way through the glass.
His head disappeared suddenly as if someone had just yanked invisibly on his ankles and the car accelerated down the road and turned into Sycamore Street, performing exactly the same disappearing trick as Gordon had already performed, but going in the opposite direction. As with him, there was no reversing back round the corner, no cries of ‘Surprise!’ from the car’s occupants.
Isobel ran after the car until she got a stitch and could run no more and then stood helplessly in the middle of the road so that the butcher’s delivery boy, whizzing carelessly round the corner on his bike, had to swerve so wildly to avoid the little sobbing figure that he toppled over and the road was strewn with ration-sized parcels of meat and Vinny was able to secure a thin link of sausages in her apron pocket as she pulled Isobel to her feet and dragged her all the way home.
gleam, like pewter. This was the time to escape, to shin down the drainpipe, run across the wet grass of the lawn. The only noise in the house was the creak-creak sound of Mrs Crosland’s snoring. Charles slid out of bed and felt the long carpet pile between his toes. His clothes were lying on a chair and he crept over to them. He seemed to have shrunk. His eyes were lower than the level of the top of the chair, his nose only reached the doorknob. His toenails click-clacked on the lino at the edge of the room.
He loped over to the dressing-table in the corner of the room. The moon had turned the dressing-table mirror into steel. He could see the moon in the mirror, he could see his face in the mirror – no. No. It wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be. Charles raised his head and let out a tremendous howl of fear, running away from the mirror and leaping onto the bed and burying his head under the covers. In the morning it would all be different. Wouldn’t it?
ferociously
,’ and Mr Crosland shouted over his shoulder, ‘That child’s
backward,
Mrs Fitzgerald!’ Then the Croslands drove away in a bad-tempered wrenching of gears. Charles sat cross-legged on the gravel, swaying backwards and forwards like a rocking Buddha and laughing his clown laugh
ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha
at the sight of their car retreating down the drive.
The important thing about the disappearing trick – something that Eliza and Gordon seemed to have failed to grasp – is that the
real
skill was coming back again after you’d vanished. Unlike his parents, Charles had mastered both halves of the trick and to celebrate he executed a mad jigging polka of triumph up and down the drive – until he tripped and cut himself and Vinny said, ‘I could have told you it would end in tears.’
Dimly, Vinny discerned that her poor housekeeping might not appeal to the paying-guest and she set about improving her housecraft. She studied the Widow’s housekeeping books – an entire kitchen shelf of
aideménage – The Housewife’s Handy Book, Aunt Kitty’s Cookery Book, Everything Within, The Modern Housewife’s Book
(for once upon a time the Widow was a very modern housewife). For a while, Vinny’s enthusiasm even expanded to include the hobby section of
Everything Within
and she attempted, amongst other useful things, ‘Sealing-Wax Craft’ and ‘A Dainty Craft with Cellophane and Silk Raffia’. It was very disturbing to come into the kitchen and find Vinny elbow-deep in papier mâché (the colour of her skin) or attempting to scale the artistic heights of ‘Loofah Craft’, clip-clipping away with scissors at the bathroom loofah to make a floral still life for the Unknown Lodger’s room.
But infinitely worse was the
ancienne cuisine
which Vinny had suddenly become a disciple of, dishes dredged up from the cookery sections of the Widow’s books that reeked of England between the wars. Dishes for which they must be guinea-pigs. ‘Spaghetti Fritters’, ‘Rabbit Soup with Curry’, ‘Compote of Pigeons with Brain Sauce’. Vinny liked nothing better than recipes that began, ‘Take a large Cod and boil whole …’
‘This is disgusting,’ Charles ventured over something called a ‘Boiled Cow-Heel Pudding’.
‘Disgusting is as disgusting does,’ Vinny said unhelpfully. They never, ever, thought that they’d feel nostalgic for Vinny’s old way of cooking.
Mr Rice was aged somewhere between thirty-five and sixty-five and had an enormous handlebar moustache, possibly to compensate for the fact that most of his dark brown hair had been devoured by baldness so that the thing he most resembled was a boiled egg. Charles and Isobel exchanged dismal looks because they couldn’t imagine anyone more boring. ‘Don’t worry,’ Vinny said, ‘there’s plenty more where he came from.’
Mr Rice wore loud dogtooth-check jackets and mustard waistcoats and claimed he was a pilot during the war. ‘Who’s he kidding?’ Vinny scoffed, but behind his back because she wanted his money.
‘Here we are,’ Vinny said, heading new lodgerwards, ‘a nice plate of “Sweetbreads Royale”.’ Chatelaine Vinny – a bleak housekeeper in hard times. ‘Well, Mr Rice,’ Vinny said, shaving slices off an unidentified roasted mammal at the Sunday dinner-table, ‘how d’you like it here then?’ Mr Rice is ‘a gentleman’ in Vinny’s estimation and his arrival makes her quite skittish for a while.
At first she simpered, bowed and scraped to Mr Rice, wringing her hands in ever-so-humbleness and Mr Rice responded by praising her landladying skills to the skies when you might have expected him instead to puzzle over the ‘Haddock Soufflé’, and query the damp in his room and the disturbing character of some of his dinners (‘Boiled Toad in the Hole,’ Vinny announced, shy, yet proud, of her newfound talents).
At breakfast and tea, Mr Rice regaled them with tales from the road. ‘A very funny thing happened to me in Birmingham this week, did I tell you?’ he asked over a dish of ‘Scotch Sheep’s Pluck’, that Vinny had laboured over all afternoon. Mr Rice had no sense of humour, in fact, if it was possible he had a negative sense of humour so that they knew that any story prefaced ‘A funny thing happened’ was inevitably going to be unbelievably tedious. What’s more, funny things happened to Mr Rice
all the time
so that they rarely endured a mealtime without passing out from boredom.
‘Mr Tapioca! Mr Sago!’ Charles hooted, his forehead hitting the table as he doubled up in a maniacal
sotto voce
laugh. Isobel worried for Charles. He was nine years old now, yet half the time he behaved like his three-year-old self. Mr Rice appeared not to notice and helped himself to a spoonful of grey boiled potatoes and waxed lyrical about home comforts. ‘Silly, silly boy!’ Vinny hissed at Charles.
‘Ah,’ Mr Rice said, sniffing like a Bisto Kid as Vinnie handed over his slice of ‘Sheep’s Tongue Shape’.
Vinny took a cigarette packet from the pocket of her Empire overall and lit up. Her gnarled hands cupped around the cigarette would have looked better on a large bird of prey. She closed her eyes and sucked hard, with an expression that suggested pain rather than pleasure, and then blew the smoke out of her nostrils, while she dished up an exotic ‘Railway Pudding’.
‘Delicious,’ proclaimed Mr Rice, a dribble of yellow custard creeping down his chin. Vinny batted her meagre eyelashes in a way that might have been interpreted as flirtatious. ‘Something in your eye, Mrs Fitzgerald?’ Mr Rice inquired through a mouthful of pudding.